When I have launched this blog I did it with intention of spread Brazilian culture and culture produced by other countries around world. And then I wanna say thank you for the people from 120 countries who visit us. Thank you! Thanks to Washington Post, NYTimes, Amazon, USAToday, Paris Review, LRB, GoodReads, Time, Vogue, Esquire, Harpers, Simon and Schuster, Latimes, NPR, London Review and other sources by permission... You are the responsible by these dreams. Thank you for All!

quinta-feira, 5 de dezembro de 2013

The myth of the werewolf, the man who by curse or design transforms
himself by the light of the full moon into a wolf or into some sort of man-wolf
beast and then roams the countryside killing and feasting upon the tender flesh
of unsuspecting villagers, has long been a well-loved and well-trodden motif.
From the ancient Greek story of Lycaon, who fed human flesh to Zeus and was
summarily transformed into a wolf by the angry god, to the 1940's Lon Chaney
portrayal in The Wolf Man, we've long loved this terrifying folktale.
Werewolf fiction is as alive and well today as it ever has been, but no recent
author has so quickly and uniquely lifted the genre from its limited fan base
to the center of popular attention as Toby Barlow has done with Sharp Teeth.

Sharp Teeth takes the werewolf myth to new heights. It poses the
question, "if there were werewolves - not just a single werewolf or even
sporadic instances of lycanthropy, but lots and lots of werewolves - what would
they do?" According to Barlow, they would form packs like wild dogs,
except they wouldn't be dogs - they'd be men. Sometimes, they'd be intelligent,
powerful men like, for instance, lawyers. Such an individual would become the
alpha dog of a werewolf pack, would grow the pack's strength, bind it together,
and give it purpose. What sort of purpose? Well, the same as any pack of wild
dogs, or men for that matter - power.

Packs of werewolves, like any urban gangs - like the Sharks and the
Jets, like the Crips and the Bloods - roam the streets of L.A. cutting each
other down, vying for power. The main difference of course is that these gangs
eat their kill. Yes, Sharp Teeth is brutal and will make an equally
brutal movie someday to rival the likes of The Wolf Man or any other in the
oeuvre. In fact it's not unlikely that Quentin Tarantino is at this very moment
closing a deal to turn Toby Barlow's novel into a vicious and blood-soaked
film.

Sharp Teeth is a gang story, but it's also a love story and a detective
story in which werewolves clean the city of meth labs and enter bridge tournaments.
Yes there is humor in Sharp Teeth - the sort of anthropomorphic humor
popularized in the cartoons of Gary Larson, except much much darker. And there
are tongue-in-cheek references to to children's books like Go Dog Go.

Sharp Teeth is truly a pleasure to read. I had no idea how I would
approach reading a novel in free verse, but the answer is pretty much like any
other novel, except different. Free verse is verse without meter or rhyme, so
it's not at all like reading poetry, though the novel is very poetic:

Her teeth hit his neck.
The last thing he sees are her eyes.
The last thing he feels is the heat of her breath on his neck.
The only thing he hears
is the might of the surging blackness
as it softly growls
for him.

Though werewolf fiction doesn't normally fall into my bailiwick, Sharp
Teeth has happily risen above the genre and has garnered a good deal of
buzz. Does a werewolf novel have to be written in verse to gain attention or be
taken seriously? I don't know. What I do know is that Barlow has breathed such
life, such intensity into his lycanthropic tale, through verse or otherwise,
that I found myself compelled from page one to rip straight through it. Like
teeth through flesh.

A fly by imagination

And life passes so quickly...

Because literature is part of our history.

The main idea of this Blog is spread the habit of reading. Literature is part of our lives. When enter in the Literature world, we read better and we improve our though and imagination.I want, with this, divide a little of my dreams. Is to give opportunity to people read and know about works produced by ancient and contemporary writers, and mainly, myself to be insert in this wonderful world of the Letters.